


That Which We Call A Rose

by everysinglefuckingusernameistakenjesus



Series: Stars, Hide Your Fire [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: And yes I did make Poe a Shakespeare nerd, Fluff, I love these nerds, M/M, Poes a little sweatheart, SO MUCH FLUFF, Yes I did quotes Shakespeare, basically Poe continues to give Finn names, gays in space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-18 23:33:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7335472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everysinglefuckingusernameistakenjesus/pseuds/everysinglefuckingusernameistakenjesus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Before I met you, I was just another Stormtrooper, collateral damage waiting to happen. I didn’t have a name or a face or a purpose except to die for the First Order. But then you flew me away from that stupid ship and gave me an identity. You told me that I was more than a helmet and a blaster." </p>
<p>In which Poe continues to name Finn and Finn continues to absolutely love it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Which We Call A Rose

**Author's Note:**

> I'd seen a lot of people talking about how Poe would totally use Finn's lack of a last name as a flirting mechanism, and I decided to do that. Granted, I made Poe a little more smooth than most people imagine it going down. But here it is just the same.

“Names are the sweetest and the most important sounds in any language.”  
-Dale Carnegie

They’d been waiting in line all day for a stupid ID card and Finn was ready to give up. It wasn’t that he didn’t need an ID card. He really needed an ID card. He was getting really tired of having to find Poe whenever he needed to get into a meeting or restricted room. He would be locked out of rooms for hours waiting for someone with the right card to let him in. This was especially awkward when Poe was on a mission and he had to ask General Organa. So it wasn’t that he didn’t need an ID card, he’d just been actively avoiding it for two reasons. The first was the line. Everytime he walked past the station, the people looked like they were ready to kill everyone in the room including themselves. It just wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to be a part of. But Poe had dragged him in kicking and screaming that morning because he was sick and tired of being lugged around base to open doors for his buddy. He knew that they probably hadn’t been in line for more than an hour, but standing between a pilot who really didn’t like Poe and a newly enlisted recruit who was so amazed by everything and everyone and wouldn’t stop mentioning how much of a hero Finn was and how much she just loved all the stories she’d heard about Poe, it seemed like it had been a life time. Poe sighed again and shot a look at Finn that said something along the lines of ‘I am so sorry I made you do this. Ren was nothing, this is what I call torture.’ Finn snickered under his breath. The pilot in front of them finally finished, and shoved past Poe as he left the room, Poe sneered. He turned around and shot a very inappropriate hand signal right into the pilot's back, hoping that he could somehow feel it. Poe turned back to the counter with a tired but genuine smile. The lady behind the desk seemed to recognize him. 

“What happened to your ID this time, Dameron?” She asked. She was a weary-looking woman somewhere around fifty. Her salt and pepper hair was tucked into a neat bun on the back of her head, and she looked like she wanted to be anywhere but there, but, if Finn were being honest, he shared that sentiment. Poe laughed nervously and rubbed the back of his neck.

“No, no nothing happened to mine.” he raised a beaten, torn, bitten-through, scorched, generally destroyed, but still somehow functional ID card. The woman smiled sarcastically. “Well, nothing recently. But my friend here hasn’t gotten his yet.” He said, gesturing towards Finn. He smiled and waved at the woman. She didn’t look up as she pulled up a blank file on her tablet. 

“Okay, hun, I need your name, age and rank.” She said absentmindedly, tucking an escape hair behind her ear. Finn liked her. She looked absolutely miserable, but she was still very nice to them. He figured that she knew who he was. He thought that it was strange that most people knew who he was and he knew who exactly five people on this base where and one of them was a big orange and white snowman. But despite knowing that he had a scar down the length of his back from the most powerful darksider in the galaxy, she treated him like any other foot soldier. He figured that that was an attitude that came from years of dealing with arrogant officers and over-energized troops.

“Finn, 24, and Captain.” He said, looking at Poe for reassurance. Poe nodded in approval, and Finn looked back at the woman. She typed in the information. 

“What’s your last name, sweetheart,” She said slowly, as if he needed help understanding it. This was the second reason. He stumbled over his words, wanting to reply but not knowing how. Poe had only given him one name, and he had never needed another. Everybody knew it was him when somebody said ‘Finn.’ He rather liked his name, and he couldn’t find any reason besides formal paperwork to have another. But there he was, standing without a name to give, and at a complete loss for words. Poe saw his slight panic and stepped up, gripping Finn’s arm with a reassuring squeeze. 

“Dameron.” He supplied, “His last name is Dameron.” He locked eyes with Finn, enjoying the look of surprise the seeped onto Finn’s face as the color seeped out of it. The shock didn’t really seem to pass, just kept washing over him again and again. Here he was, named by the same man twice and being completely flabbergasted by it. 

The woman looked at them momentarily, as if she couldn’t believe how lame that was, because it was the lamest thing she had ever seen in her many years of issuing IDs. Finn blushed and answered the rest of her questions bashfully. Poe kept chucking to himself as Finn mumbled his responses and tugged at the sleeves of his-Poe’s-their jacket. He kept thinking about it, kept thinking about how he was now officially Finn Dameron, friend-boyfriend-husband-something of Poe Dameron, the best pilot in the galaxy. He kept turning it over in his head and smiling at it. Poe naming him the first time was enough to set the butterflies in his stomach on high speed. It was a split second decision, made in the heat of a battle, out of necessity. But he had been so proud to say that he was Finn and that his friend-boyfriend-husband-something Poe Dameron had named him. Poe had ensured him multiple times that he could change the name, that he wasn’t entitled to keep it, and in turn, Finn had ensured him that it was the best name in the galaxy and he wouldn’t give it up for the entire planet. 

Poe didn’t really get the importance of names to him. He had only been given a number, a spot in a line full of other soldiers who looked just like him with their masks on and that name, those four letters meant something. They meant that he was more than a stormtrooper. They meant that he wasn’t a number, that he was more than another soldier in another line. It meant that he was Finn. Not FN-2187. He was a person. And a name was something that he never had. He’d spent a long time looking at names after he recovered from Ren. He looked up articles and quotes about names and read just about every scrap of information about every name in the database. Poe had joined in his searching, handing him scraps of paper with notes scrawled across them in the atrocious handwriting that Finn found only pilots and doctors had. One thing that stuck with him was a piece of poetry or something of the like that Poe had spent quite some time excitedly explaining to him. It was a passage from one of his favorite plays ever written by an amazing writer who Poe was obsessed with. 

“What’s in a name?/  
That which we call a rose/  
By any other name/  
Would smell as sweet.” 

He laughed when Poe read it aloud with a wave of his hand and a grand voice, as if he a duke or someone of royal importance (because Poe was important, but in the gritty, raggedy, Han Solo, hero way, not a General Princess Leia Organa way). But that passage struck him because it illustrated how unimportant names were to everyone else. Having a name was a normal thing. Everybody but him seemed to have had one since birth, and the notion of them being such a big deal to someone seemed just a bit insane. Poe brushed his name off all the time. The three of them often left base pretty often, usually under order because Poe got restless and started bouncing off the walls, Rey got trapped in her own head, and Finn was void of most experiences. So General Organa would throw them out every couple of weeks, and when they did get out, Poe would wear sunglasses and call himself Will because he didn’t want anyone to recognize him. Poe Dameron was a household name, the face of a revolution. Everyone on the planet knew who he was. It was almost impossible for him to step foot off base without being bombarded. Finn was so amazed how quickly Poe just dropped his identity, linked arms with Rey and talk at length about her outfit and how Finn really needed to wear something more than just black. Finn thought that it was exhausting, creating an entirely different person because he had spent so much time creating just one. 

The lady behind the counter finished the information and printed out the ID card on a bendy but firm plastic material. He looked at it and smiled back at the small picture of himself in the corner. Poe clapped his hand on Finn’s shoulder and said something about how he wouldn’t need back up every time he had to get into a meeting. The lady smiled and reached into her desk, pulling out another card and handing it to Poe.

“You’ll be needing a new one soon, anyway.” Poe laughed and made a comment about her having a number of his IDs in her desk. Finn waved politely as they walked out of the room and down the hallway towards their quarters. Poe had pulled strings to put Rey and Finn on either side of him. He said it was because they needed a tour guide and it was better that they were readily available, but Finn had a sneaking suspicion that it was because Poe wanted to keep them as close to his chest as he could. It was a good call. He had spent many nights carefully approaching Poe’s door as soft protests were being murmured in the middle of a dream that he couldn’t even imagine. He’d only entered once, when the soft murmurs turned into muffled screams of agony and he couldn’t stand still anymore. He’d stood outside a door and listened to Poe Dameron scream before, and he wasn't going to wait until the torture was over to help him this time. He went inside and tried to wake Poe up, but he was so deep in his own nightmare that there was no stirring him. So Finn crawled in the bed and held him so he wouldn’t hurt himself and when they woke up the next morning, neither said anything, but Finn was glad that Poe had insisted on keeping them close.

Poe was leaning against Finn’s wall his arms crossed on his chest. He was smiling because he always seemed to be smiling when he was with Finn. Poe had a million dollar smile, but it was reserved for certain people and certain situations. His squadron, when they were headed into something that might kill then, General Organa, whenever she said she was proud of him, Rey, whenever she spread out a gigantic book about plant life in front of him, explaining foliage in a fast-paced, adorably excited voice. But he always smiled when Finn walked in the room, or when Finn was confused about something, or when Finn did anything. Poe smiled so much around him that when he started making a list, he ended up just writing everything. Everything about him made Poe smile. He tossed his-Poe’s-their jacket onto his bed and plopped down into the chair behind his desk. He held the card in his hands and admired his Poe Dameron approved name printed in neat black letters. 

“You don’t have to keep it, you know.” Poe said after a moment of silence. Finn looked up at him in confusion, knitting his brows together. “The name. You don’t have to keep it. Finn or Dameron. We can change it when you get your ID renewed. It was just in the moment, you needed a name, just like the first time.” He was running his hand through his hair, tugging at the curls that fell into his eyes.

“No, I think I’ll keep them, both of them, if that’s alright.” Finn protested, pressing his chin to his chest to hide his blush. He studied his hands as if they were the most interesting things that he had ever seen in his life. 

“You shouldn’t feel like you have to because-” 

“I don’t.” Finn cut him off. “I don’t. And I don’t think you understand how important the name you gave me is.” He tried to stop himself there, let that be the end of the conversation, but the words kept spewing out of him. “Before I met you, I was just another Stormtrooper, collateral damage waiting to happen. I didn’t have a name or a face or a purpose except to die for the First Order. But then you flew me away from that stupid ship and gave me an identity. You told me that I was more than a helmet and a blaster. I’ll never be able to repay you for that. So, I think that you could call me Bubbles and I’d parade it like rank. I’d love nothing more than to be Finn Dameron forever, if you’re okay with sharing a name.” 

Poe pushed away from the wall and walked slowly to Finn. That stupid grin was still plastered across his face and Finn wanted to kiss it right off. But he stayed where he was, head bowed, waiting for Poe to do something. He stood before Finn for a moment, silent and watching, before he knelt down in front of the chair. He moved slowly, as if he were going to scare Finn if he moved too quickly. Poe’s hand inched it’s way up to Finn’s face and cupped his cheek, lifting his head so that he could see his eyes. The hand retreated after a moment, leaving a layer of warmth on Finn’s cheek. Poe wrapped both his hands around Finn’s and held them tightly.

“Finn Dameron, what you call yourself means very little to me, as long as you’re here, as long as you’re close, and as long as I get to see those pretty eyes every day. That which we call a rose, and all that, but I am very glad to rent out my name to anyone as kind, fiercely loving, and incredibly talented as you are. And, you know, so far I haven’t found anyone else.” He slowly lifted their clasped hands and planted a soft kiss on Finn’s knuckles. He shot up to his feet, suddenly regaining his normal break-neck speed, and headed to the door. “So see you, at dinner.” He said, as if they hadn’t basically just professed their love to each other. 

He had been sitting stock still with perfect posture a second before, but Finn collapsed back in his chair after the door slid shut, letting out a heavy breath. A number of emotions were coursing through his chest at that moment, adrenaline from the number of things that he had just confessed, fear about what the hell the next step in this shipwreck of a relationship was, and the biggest burst of pure happiness that he had experienced since he was standing in that corridor, holding up a half conscious Poe, formulating a plan that barely worked. Or maybe he had been happier when he saw Poe on that runway, healthy, in one piece, sprinting towards him, telling himself over and over, he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive. He couldn’t really breath, but he didn’t really care, because Poe just said so many good things to him and he needed to keep hearing those kinds of things. 

And then he thought about what names meant to him again, but this time, what Poe’s name meant to him. Poe meant warmth, kindness, love. It meant a beaten up brown leather jacket that apparently suited him. It meant scruffy brown curls that stuck up in every direction and looked so damn soft. It meant his name being screamed across hangers and training rooms because Poe so excited to see him every time he saw him. It meant nights sitting in his room, scrolling through book after book because Finn had missed so much good literature. It meant smiling constantly, it meant holding him during nightmares, it meant hugging him after missions, it meant pressing his shoulder against Poe’s when they stood next to each other to milk the warmth out of every tough. It meant fingers lingering a bit too long and lips pressing against temples. It meant sharing names and kissing knuckles. Poe Dameron meant to damn much to him.

And to think that their meeting was just a coincidence. If he had been on a different squadron, if he had decided to shoot the villagers, if he hadn’t been assigned to guard the torture room, if he had just ignored the screams that tore at his soul, then Poe would have died and he would never have left the First Order. They weren’t meant to become best friends. He wasn’t meant to fall in love with Poe. He was just going to get off the base, just get away, and then they could go their separate ways, but Poe and Rey and that stupid droid shaped his future in a matter of days. He thought that he needed Poe to get away and that would be it. Finn would never have guessed that Poe would become so important to him so quickly. 

He would never have guessed that he would still need his pilot.


End file.
